Clone Wars
by Roach Patrol
Summary: Dib wakes up as a clone one day. Now, as champion of what's left of humanity, he must do what all the others have failed to do: Defeat Zim once and for all.
1. one

AN: …Can't think of anything to say, actually. On with the show!

OOO

"So, what is that, anyway?" Gaz asked, startling her brother into frying his fingers on a fizzling power cord. Dib hissed in surprise, falling over in the tangle of wires and scrap parts and blowing on his fingers.

"It's a replication kit," He muttered, sucking on his injured digits and indicating what looked like half a computer turned inside out super-glued on to a microwave oven and a pair of upside-down goggles. Multicolored wire spread out from the contraption like a spider's web on a severe acid trip. "See, I figured that since I'm the only one standing between the human race and total annihilation, it would be a bad thing if I died." He paused to glance hopefully at his sister, hoping for a reaction.

"Nnh." Gaz responded, shrugging. "It's your stupid war, anyway."

This was a much longer response than he had expected. Encouraged, he continued. "So I decided to make sure I could be cloned, you know, if I died. So I could keep fighting Zim. The DNA part was easy, because I just needed some blood and a way to keep it fresh, but the whole making-sure-that-what-comes-out-still-thinks-like-me...part, that was tricky. So many variables, and it turns out that it's way harder than I initially calculated to actually record the content of my brain, and to even be able to have something that it could be copied on to..." He broke off again, to gauge his sister's reaction.

Gaz managed to indicate, with amazing efficiency, that she did not, in fact, care. She did this by means of resuming whatever game she was playing.

"Anyway, it turns out my brain will probably fit on a minidisk."

This, evidently, did not come as a surprise.

"Gaz, why are you in my room? Did Dad tell you to humor me again?"

"No," She said, glancing up, "Half the power in the city went out a few minutes ago, so I figured that you were doing something stupid again."

"Are you going to hurt me now?" Dib asked, surreptitiously making sure he was completely disentangled from the hurricane of wires around them.

Gaz shrugged. "Dad's got a generator in the lab, so we're good. I just want to see if you're going to electrocute yourself."

Dib glared at her. "As a matter of fact," He said with as much dignity as he could muster, "I already have."

Gaz snickered and sat down on the edge of his bed, pulling open the bag of popcorn and roughly shoving aside several wires.

"Hey, those are important!" Dib snapped, carefully repositioning them. "I'm almost at the final recording stage!"

"What happens then?"

"Um. I put the goggles over my eyes and press the red button."

Gaz thought about this for a moment.

"You've got that blue wire in the wrong socket."

Dib looked where she was pointing.

"You need to put it in the trans-neural port, not the Isiotron 103-Q port." She elaborated, as if explaining that no, the sky was not actually plaid.

"And if I put it in the Isiotron 103-Q port I'll blow up, won't I?" Dib growled, noting with a sinking feeling in his gut that she was right.

"No, if you don't then I'm pretty sure you're going to melt your brain. That isn't as cool to watch."

Dib sighed again, but moved the wire where she indicated.

"Now can I do it, your majesty?" He snapped.

"Eh." She shrugged and scooped up a mouthful of popcorn.

Dib snorted and made one last adjustment to the receiver's active site, and lifted the goggles to his eyes.

OOO

He woke up in utter darkness. It felt like a very large, and very dead, weasel had been crammed in his mouth, and his head hurt. Upon further exploration, the weasel proved to be his tongue.

"What just happened, Gaz?" He asked. Or tried to ask. What came out was a barely-audble moan. "Whshlghash?"

"Um, ummm….Ah!" There was a rustle of paper from beside him. "Um, Gaz isn't here right now, sir." A girl's voice said nervously. "We are fairly sure that she's, um, dead."

He tried to sit up. It didn't work.

"Wh-"

"Um…No, there wasn't an explosion, sir."

"Di-"

"Your invention worked perfectly, sir."

"Buh-"

"Gaz is dead, sir, because you're in the future, sir."

"Nuh!"

Another nervous rustle of paper. "Um, yeah. More accurately, you're in the present sir, but a present that is a long way after your present, sir."

"Hnh-"

"As near as anyone can tell, sir, somewhat more than a century."

"Oh."

Dib tried to think about this, but his brain wasn't working much better than his tongue.

"Why-"

"Um, um, you've …asked these questions before, sir. That's how we know."

"I'm-"

"A clone, sir, yes."

"Oh."

There didn't seem to be much to say to that.

"Really a clone?"

"Um. Yes, sir, I'm pretty sure you are, sir."

Dib tried to sit up again, but straps around his face kept him fastened to the…table, it was a table or cot or something. Dib groped carefully with his fingers along the edges of the surface he was on until he found the clasps on the buckles around his head. He hesitated, partly out of politeness and partly because even that effort had almost exhausted him.

"Can I?"

"Um. Yeah- yes! Yes, sir, yes you can."

Dib fumbled the buckles open and pried what felt like a pair of goggles –the couldn't be the same ones he had been using, but they felt like it- off his face, and winced as light speared into his eyes. A pair of battered glasses were pressed into his hands. After a few moments of blinking he made out the hazy figure of someone, presumably the girl, beside his cot. She would have been a plain, nondescript-looking girl save for her hair, an unusual dusty greyish lavender but cropped to a fuzz, the patched, overlarge white lab coat and black gloves she wore, and battered looking earphone-microphone-headset thing over the left side of her face. She was shifting her weight nervously from foot to foot, and holding a clip-board like a shield in front of her with one hand and a steaming thermos in the other.

"Um. What now?" He asked her, feeling stupid. It wasn't every day that one woke up a clone.

She flinched guiltily and handed him the thermos. Dib took it, confused. It was thick red plastic, a web of hair-thin cracks along one side, and filled with a thick grayish brown stew that smelled vaguely like meat but mostly like mud.

"You, um, drink this, sir." The girl said, digging out a spoon from a pocket. Dib, still confused, took the spoon as well and stared at it. It was a normal metal spoon.

"What's this made out of?" he asked, scooping up a bite of the stew. It tasted vaguely like meat but mostly like mud, as he had suspected.

"The, uh, the spoon, sir?"

"The soup."

"Um, um, nutrients. Sir."

Dib took another bite. It wasn't that bad, considering. "What kind of nutrients?"

"I'm, um, not allowed to tell you, sir." The girl said, fidgeting with her clipboard. "The last one we told wouldn't eat it, and it's important for developing your nervous system."

Dib tried to smile reassuringly, popping another bite into his mouth and closing his eyes in feigned enjoyment. "Mm-mmm." He was starting to feel better already, and his headache was giving way to a ravenous hunger. "Well, as –mmf- long as it isn't rat –mff- brains," He joked, between huge bites.

The girl turned bright red. He paused in horror, the spoon still in his mouth.

"It is made of rat brains, isn't it?"

"Um, no?"

Dib sighed and kept eating; to do anything other than pour food into his screamingly empty gut as fast as he possibly could would be torture. "It's better than cafeteria food, anyway."

The girl sighed in relief.

"So, um, what happened to the one that wouldn't eat the, uh, the rat brains?"

The girl hesitated, and pressed two fingers to her earphone, listening. "Not allowed to tell you, sir." She said after a moment.

"Did he die?"

"Oh, almost all of you have died." The girl said, then clapped her hands over her mouth.

"This just gets better and better." Dib groaned, rubbing the bridge of his nose, but he felt nothing other than a faint irritation. They must have drugged the soup. He paused, sniffing the muck, then gave up and drained the rest. "Can I have the full story?"

"Um, I'm not the one that tells you that, sir, this is my first assignment on my own, um, sir, um, I'm only a seventh level-"

"Can you take me to the person that can?"

Another pause, her fingers pressed to her earphones and her lips moving slightly. Sub-vocalization?

"Yes, sir. Yes, I can."


	2. two

He was given what might have been a lab coat but could more aptly have been called a sack with sleeves, and led through long, rough-cut stone hallways –tunnels?- full of hurrying men and women in patched and stained lab coats, holding clipboards, coils of wire, woven baskets of unidentifiable pieces of machinery, bowls of soup or oil or sand or less identifiable substances. All wore lab coats and gloves; all had some sort of headset, most were talking to themselves or to the headsets. Dib noticed, with a nasty shock, that the some of the ones in the less-patched lab coats had headsets that trailed power cords into what looked like irken paks lashed on to their backs, glowing a faint cyan blue against the off-white of the cloth. One or two were missing limbs, maneuvering through the crowd on shining alien spider-legs. The presumably lower ranked scientists stood aside as they passed, carefully keeping their own feet out of the way of the sinuous metal spikes.

His guide walked quickly, forcing Dib to hurry on unsteady legs, totally lost but filled with an immense, detached sort of calmness, and the girl finally brought him to a large room covered with papers taped to the walls and stopped, stepping aside. Dib glanced back at her, and she smiled nervously. "He's in there, sir."

"Uh, thanks. Thanks a lot."

She turned to go.

"Hey, what's your name, anyway?"

She shrugged apologetically and left, vanishing into the busy hallways.

"They aren't allowed to tell you their names." A tired voice said from behind him, and Dib whirled around to see a haggard young man, maybe in his early twenties but with an air of wry hopelessness that made him seem far older, seated on a large patched pillow. A pad of paper and a stick of charcoal was loosely held in his scarred hands, the sleeves of his lab coat rolled up past bladelike elbows and smudged to amottled grey from countless hours of sketching. The man was all angles, it seemed, even his wild mop of black hair sticking everywhere in sharp, greasy tufts, and his figure looked gauntly tall even sitting down. Dib shifted his weight uneasily as he saw the two bandoleers of paks slung around his chest in a shining 'X', the wires feeding into a considerably bulkier headset than what had appeared to be regulation and the tinted blue visor that scythed bladelike across one mechanical eye, small streams of text running through the color in front of the cyborg metal orb.

"They can't tell you their names or our numbers, kid, or a good deal of other information. It messes things up." The man elaborated. "I'd tell you but I've lost track of how many of you I've seen years ago. Probably years ago. No days, see? Everything's tunnels."

"And they all died?"

"Believe it or not, about thirty or so killed themselves. The techs figured if they could bounce ideas off each other they could come up with something that only one of us couldn't."

"They killed themselves?" Dib repeated, horrified.

"More accurately, they killed each other. Couldn't figure out which was the boss, then went crazy. Schizophrenic paranoia, as far as anyone can tell. Not particularly mentally stable, if you know what I mean."

"Um." Dib sat down hard on the rough stone floor. Rat soup or no, this was getting hard to handle. "And this isn't a dream or something?"

The man snorted bitterly. "If you figure out a way to wake up, tell me."

"Just...what's going on? Half an hour ago I was in my room with Gaz waiting to watch me explode or something, and then I wake up with this girl scared to death of me and calling me sir!"

The man sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose, his expression softening slightly.

"Sorry. Rat soup only goes so far, doesn't it? So, time for introductions. You're a clone, and I'm truly sorry for you. You get to keep your name for now, since you're the only active-status clone at the moment, but mostly you'll be called 'sir'. The techs're big on formality; there's a quasi-caste system going on. When there's more than one Dib in a room they're called Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and so on according to age, but the pecking order's pretty simple right now, because a missile got lucky last week and blew out half the generator galleries,and there isn't a lot of power to spare. Some of the guys in Communications think that the irkens have found a way to pick up on our radio frequencies, and the only reason they're not just melting half the hemisphere to get at us is that it would mess up the biosphere. Earth's a lot more fragile than most planets, and from what we can understand the Tallest have their antennae in knots trying to deal with us without blowing up the entire planet." He grinned viciously. "Earth's too valuable to scrap, and we're too irritating to let live. I hope those green bastards are getting some really nice ulcers over that one."

"Hold on, hold on," Dib pleaded, raising his hands. "This is too much. Look, uh- Mister- sir- uh- what am I supposed to call you?"

The man smiled. It wasn't a happy smile. "What, didn't I say? Call me Alpha."

Dib stared at the man in horror, trying to fight down the panic that was roaring up through the layers of chemical numbness.

"Take deep breaths."

"It helps?"

"Not all that much, but if you keep hyperventilating you could crack your very expensive skull on the ground."

Dib took a deep breath, then another. The calmness that had been almost ripped away flowed back slowly, and he steadied himself a little. Alpha watched him pityingly, leaning back again to let his younger self regain his composure. Dib tried to distract himself by studying the hundreds of sheets of paper on the walls, diagrams of engines, generators, textile looms, chemical equations, mining machinery, air- and space-ships, guns, calculations of air pressure and gravity and energy, meteorology tables and sketches of irken anatomy, tentative labels circling vulnerable spots. It was all in his own handwriting.

Alpha explained while Dib studied the pictures, trying to make sense of what his twins had gone through before him.

After Dib had made a copying kit for himself, he hid it in his father's lab where it remained for years, while Dib himself grew up and forgot about it, or, if he remembered, never found the time to update it. His ongoing quarrel with Zim grew more and more ritualistic as Zim's leaders grew more distant, the news of the Empire less frequent, and Zim more delusional. It was entirely likely that Dib and Zim worked out an unspoken ceasefire of some sort, or at least a significant lessening of hostilities. What remained of Dib's 'case files' hinted of a young man grown almost affectionate towards the alien, and the reports grew less and less frequent until the near-anecdotal entry in which Dib reported Zim's reactions towards a mug of hot chocolate, apparently the first dose of real chocolatethe alien had ever consumed. It turned out that the chemical structure of the cacao bean, when combined with massive amounts of sucrose, had an intoxicating effect on Irken biochemistry.

Zim was actually in the midst of a quasi-official truce with the young man at the time, both of them working together to end the fallout radiation of the pair's latest nuclear-powered-mech-battle, which had been giving humans nasty radiation burns and sent Zim into molt, complete with unbearable itching. Dib had not-so-innocently handed Zimthe mug of cocoa to see what would happen. Zim had drained the cup, demanded seconds, then thirds, spilled most of his fourths from an incoherent rant emphasized with his mug, and passed out mid-snarl. Dib cleaned up the mess, tossed a blanket over him –doing away with his opponent would have cut off his access to the irken's superior technology- and gone upstairs to report success.

It was the last entry in the log.

The main computer at Membrane Tech logged a swarm of dense objects heading for a collision course with earth, putting them down as probably asteroids. The usual anti-debris missiles were sent out to disintegrate the rocks, a flashy meteor shower was predicted in the paper. The scientists, under Professor Membrane's supervision, returned to the task of making the Perfect Sandwich.

Twenty six hours later, weeks before even the wildest calculations expected them, the 'asteroids' arrived and leveled all major cities to miles of molten metal and glass in the space of two more hours. It was presumed that Zim had somehow achieved contact with his leaders to introduce them to his newest obsession; within two days a small, worthless, unknown planet was suddenly the only place in the universe that could deliver irkenkind's first and only recreational drug, and its repulsive population the only race to be able to tolerate the water –and backbreaking manual labor- necessary for its production. Within a week civilization as anyone knew it had been erased, and within a year Earth was essentially one big candy factory.

The scientists at Membrane Tech, however unprepared, were still a collection of the brightest minds in the northern hemisphere, and had reacted quickly enough to honeycomb the land around the laboratories with a maze of twisting, winding tunnels carved through the stone underneath, protected from radar, stocked with enough raw materials and spare parts to ensure that the Irken's victory could never be wholly complete. It was then that they found the minidisk-

_-"What's this?" Simmons asked, turning over the cardboard box in his hands, horrified fascination reflected in his eyes as he read the lettering on its surface. Dib smiled bitterly before a brief spasm of coughing overtook him –the silicate dust from the tunnels was everywhere, eating away at their lungs, but there was never enough time, never enough time and they'd fix themselves later- and pulled the restraining straps of the Spittle Runner's seat over his chest. "A little present, maybe, from me to the world." Dib told the aging man, then lowered the round shielding on the front of the ship. He could still see the childishly careful D-I-B penned on the 'gift', as what was left of the world dropped away beneath him-_

Dib gasped as he was backhanded hard across his face. Opening his eyes he stared into the gaunt, scarred face of his older self.

"Wha-" He managed, trying to sit up.

Alpha's face slid backwards, and Dib realized that he was being held by two spiderlegs under his arms, suspended eye-level with the taller man, who was balancing on four more of them. Alpha breathed a sigh of relief and set the boy down, the twolegs used as arms retreating into their paks. Using his four walking legs he backed away a few feet in a disturbingly sinuous motion, lowering his body gingerly on to the cushion again.

"Now is the time where I say, 'Perhaps you are indeed…' and trail off all dramatically," The man said, rubbing the bridge of his nose tiredly, "And then you say-"

"Indeed what?" Dib snapped.

" 'Indeed…the Chosen One.' Or some crap like that." Alpha sighed, flopping backwards.

"The what now?" Dib asked flatly.

Alpha raised a long-fingered, skeletal hand. "You know, just generally chosen. Lead our people to glory against the oppressor. Same shit, different day, huh? You had a seizure or something. I'll have to ask the Techs to stop experimenting with the nutrients. Run along now, and I'll tell you the rest when you're not likely to bite through your own tongue again."

Another lab-coated man had stepped into the room and gave Alpha a brief bow, who gave a brief snort of either laughter or disgust, then gently took hold of Dib's hand and led him back through the halls into a huge room full of bunks, most of them empty. As Dib slipped under the sheets and out of consciousness, he couldn't stop wondering why his older self's eyes had been so fearfully, desperately hopeful.


	3. three

_He had Zim trapped under the hull of his Doom-mech-whatever-the-hell-it-was, clawing at the pavement futilely in an attempt to work his way out from under the four tons of Irkin alloy._

_Savoring his victory, Dib perched on the foot of his own mech two yards away, smugly slurping from a titanium thermos of coffee. They'd destroyed almost half of London before Dib had figured out the encryption codes to Zim's mech and uploaded a few choice viruses, and a part of Dib –the small, sneaky, usually ignored part- was perversely proud of the wreckage._

"_Dib!" The alien screamed, "You –nff!- won't get –nff!- away with this, you vile human filth-pig! I'll –gnghr!- get you for this!"_

_Dib took a long sip wandered over, watching his enemy struggle with vast amusement. It began to drizzle slowly, more a vertical fog than a rain, but the increased participation lent more of an edge to the alien's desperate thrashing. Dib watched his nemesis, his heart sinking. _

_Climbing back in his own machine he had it squat down, digging its clawed fingers under the rim of Zim's ruined mech-_

"Well?" An terse, authoritative voice asked, sounding almost like dad's- but it couldn't be dad's, it was too young, too… irate, dad had always been strung tight as a stretched rubber band but had never held that knife's edge in his words. Who…? Dib resisted the urge to turn over, trying to remember why his room smelled so metallic, and why his bed was so hard-

"Um, Sir?" A new voice, a girl's, faint and high and worried and familiar.

"Sorry, sorry. So, how is he?"

"Seems fine, sir. Pulse rate and body temperature normal… He's settling in to his body fine. Shock onset predicted at normal-"

"You can't tell me that was a normal coping mechanism back there, tyro, he was spasming like a fish full of nerve gas!"

"No, sir, please, sir! We don't know what it is, really sir, no one's made any modifications to the nutrient recipe-"

"And his brain patterns? How are they?"

"Unusual, sir."

"…How?"

"He's…dreaming, sir."

A long pause. Dib tried to slow down his breathing. Wires. Gaz. Clones- He was a clone, shit, why did it have to be him why couldn't it have been another him why wasn't he in his own bed in his own house in his own time- Calm down. Calm down. Shit, calm down. So it wasn't a dream or –he wasn't crazy!- couldn't be a hallucination- so it was real. Real. Shit. Then that voice that wasn't dad's was his…sort of…was that other him, Alpha, and the girl –the girl that he'd woken up to. Didn't know her name, Alpha had pronounced 'tyro' as more of a title –an epithet- than a name.

They were monitoring his brain patterns? Why? Well, obviously they wanted to make sure he wasn't…unstable but it was still…wrong. Feeling. Ish. Dib hoped there weren't any of the monitors in the room; he had always drea- he had always wanted to wake up on some secret, important conversation, with tense sentences flying through the darkness over his head like the missing pieces of a jigsaw.

Be careful what you wish for, he thought bitterly.

"Dreaming." Alpha said after a pause, dangerously soft.

"Y-yes, sir."

"Fucking hell." Dib could almost see the man rub the bridge of his nose wearily.

"If you say s-so, sir."

"Okay, that settles it, tyro, and we don't have enough spare power for another one so we'll have to make do and hope this sucker doesn't blow up in our lap. You're promoted to Handler, effective immediately, congratulations, good job, woo-hoo, take him over to Ground Zero after breakfast and I'll meet you there. Okay? Okay. "

There was a complicated flurry of clicking noises, like metal on stone –those spiderlegs that Alpha had used?- which promptly settled out to a simple four-legged scuttle and faded, and the heavy sounds of the girl breathing hard. Dib lay there, his entire skin prickling uncomfortably under the imagined 'tyro's' stare, then breathed a sigh of relief as soon as the girl's more pedestrian footsteps had faded away.

OOO

"S-sir?"

"Mnh?" Dib responded intelligently, waking up again, this time to painfully bright fluorescent light, and the girl's worried face hovering over his.

"Umm, I'm your new- new- um, guide, yes, and I've been assigned to take you to breakfast, sir."

"Okay." Dib said, sitting up and running a hand self-consciously through his hair, that one tuft reassuringly fighting its way perpendicular again, a single normal detail in this incredibly non-normal setting. The girl was staring at him like he was some sort of fascinatingly dangerous bomb, and she flinched when he scrambled clumsily off the cot. His limbs were longer than he remembered, and it was throwing his balance off… "I'm fine with that." He said, as reassuringly as he could. He'd never been the focus of such nervous attention, and it was making him edgy as well.

She smiled in relief, fidgeting with the cord of her headset. "Th-this way, sir."

The hallways were just as crowded as the last two times he had been led through them, although he noticed less spider-legged Techs than before, and the few that were abroad scuttling intently in the same general directions. Dib, still wearing the same rumpled lab coat and bare feet, felt as if he were in pajamas, his embarrassment not alleviated by the fact that absolutely everyone, including his guide, politely avoided looking at him as much as possible.

The Mess Hall, as the words carved into the rock indicated, was a surprisingly large hall of tables and full of lab-coated, headphoned young men and women, all of them looking somewhere before full adulthood but older than adolescents. Interestingly enough, purple seemed to be the prevalent hair color, shades of it ranging from near-burgundy to indigo to neon to off-black. They were college age, perhaps, but all of them had an ever-so-slightly-unhealthy leanness to the way they moved and the way their coats and gloves hung on their frames that Dib had never seen back home. They ignored him –nothing he wasn't used to- and Dib silently watched a few interactions unseen as he tagged along after his guide through the long tables.

Despite their costuming and thinness –and tallness, he would swear no one was under six feet around here- they interacted a good deal like the kids in the skool cafeteria did. He could almost make out a few cliques, a cluster of slightly-more muscular-techs –or were they tyros?- laughing and giving each other manly shoulder-punches here, a group of impressively goggled kids fixing –or dissecting?- another near-frantic boy's headset as he hovered nervously there, a small cluster of females fussing with each other's hair and admiring the previously noted jocks. After the fourth time tripping over his feet he gave up gawking and kept his head down, trying to keep up with his guide's deceptively quick pace. Finally an unoccupied section of table at the back of the hall, where a mixed group of skittish-looking kids watched them warily and then scattered with mock-casualness to the adjoining seats, throwing furtive looking glances at a resentfully blushing Dib and his equally embarrassed tyro. She didn't explain, and Dib didn't ask, his normal curiosity dampened by the sheer strangeness of everything. Zim's base, he could deal with. Skool, he could deal with. This…was so different than either of them.

Over a small bowl of some sort of tasteless bran-oatmeal with, unexpectedly, fresh orange slices -delivered by what looked like a modified version of the flying skool-spycams-- Dib took the time to study his new guide. She was only a head taller than he was, middle teens maybe, probably a few years younger than the rest of the age-group eating in the Mess Hall. The hair color that had seemed so strange when he first woke to this reality looking positively drab when faced up against the far more vibrant shades that other tyros wore, but she looked very familiar, somehow…almost like what Zita might have grown into, if she bleached her hair and if you took away everything inside Zita's head and poured in a gallon of sheer nervous tension, like a sparrow or a small mouse in a horribly exposed space. Dib expected her to turn into a blur on the horizon if he so much as dropped his spoon. As soon as he had finished the last bite –it was far from enough but the sheer gloopy texture of the bran made him never want to eat anything ever again, although the orange was delicious- she stood up abruptly, walking with the same too-quick stride, back the way she had led him in.

This time he was taken to a smaller room, worryingly labeled Station IV, where Alpha and a small handful of multi-paked Techs were clustered around a holographic display of some sort of exploded-diagram…something…mechanicy, Alpha's many metal limbs turning the image and pointing out various features as he conferred with the others in a hushed, serious tone, his real hands clasped behind his back the a take-me-seriously-pose so reminiscent of Professor Membrane's body language that Dib felt like he was doing something wrong, seeing himself like that. But every figure in the room turned almost instantly as Dib and his tyro entered, looking startled, causing the girl to step back apprehensively and the illusion was broken. This wasn't his Dad giving a speech to a group of adoring scientists, this was…too many unknowns, and the techs didn't look particularly happy, either.

"A tyro and a clone, Dib?" One of the women –a hatchet-faced, anemically pale old woman with wisps of faint plum in her severely cropped grey hair and set of dauntingly complicated goggles- asked, cocking her head to one side. Half of her face was a gut-wrenching mesh of scars and metal staples, Dib saw with an involuntary surge of horror. "To what do we owe this interruption?"

"I- I- I….w-was…told to, to come here at, at, after breakfast and…" Dib's companion stammered, wilting under the combined not-quite-glare of the half-dozen old men and women, each of them decked to the hilt in complicated-looking gadgetry and fearsome looking scars.

Alpha clapped his hands together for attention, frowning. "They're with me. I wanted my newest Beta to work on this afternoon's situation with us, start to get the hang of things. He could be the last clone for awhile, you know, so we might as well do something different for a change. They _won't_-" He gave the two newcomers a quick glare and the girl flattened herself to the wall, "be any trouble."

One of the men in the back –Dib caught a glimpse of dark skin and a shock of white hair- sighed quietly, breaking the silence. "If you say so, Dib. Now, new gadgets aside, what's this afternoon situation you mentioned?"

Alpha turned back to the holograph's console, bringing up a display of what looked like a three dimensional ant-farm filled with blue and maroon smoke. "At oh-twenty-two hours three platoons of our favorite galactic conquerors are going to sneak-attack the Northwest wing of our humble abode, pillaging like fuck as they go their merry way. They've learned our latest code, it turns out, and they have all the necessary passwords to make it as far as the core generators. Estimated 90 percent casualties on our side; they're packing serious fire-power, and at least the captains of the squads have personal SIR units. The good news is…Beta!"

Dib snapped instinctively to attention as the room's collective attention descended on him. "Um, what? Sir?"

"Tell me what the good news is, Beta." Alpha repeated.

"Um." Dib thought. "How much is a platoon?"

"A set of the bastards is three, squad is nine, troop is twenty seven, platoon is eighty-one of them." Alpha reeled off, looking pleased. "We haven't figured out how they pick the boss but there's one leader per set, one boss leader of the three leaders, one boss boss leader, etcetera. In this scenario, each troop leader –boss over nine other bosses and twenty-six total- each of them are going to have a SIR unit."

"So that's…hold on…three troops to a squad?"

"To a platoon. Squad, troop, platoon."

"But that's only nine SIRS, then. Is that bad?"

The look on Alpha's face indicated that Dib had guessed wrong. One limb worked its way out of one of the paks and delicately tapped a single button, bringing up a wire-frame model of the typical cute, toy-like robot Dib had grown a soft spot for. Another dainty tap and the robot exploded, the tube of light that suspended the hologram filling up with wire-frame machinery, nukes, missiles, rocket launchers, disturbing-looking scythes and saws and blades until the display was forced to overlap the weapons, sending cylinders floating through pronged spheres through nozzles, and still more weaponry was appearing.

"Oh." Dib managed, wilting a little under the tall man's disapproval and the jammed display in the holograph. "I guess it is kinda bad."

"Guess again, Beta. Tell me the _good_ news."

Good news, good news, what was good about this situation? He'd been dragged god knew how many years into the future in time to be slaughtered in a sneak-attack by psychotic little alien toys.

"Wait, how can it be a sneak attack if we know it's going to happen?" Dib thought with irritation, then realized he'd asked it out loud.

"_Exactly!_" Alpha yelled, suddenly and abruptly delighted. Whirling around he resumed jabbing at the keys, the tunnels popping back up, the former maroon wiggly lines coiling through the tunnels, as before, but this time the blue lines intersecting, running parallel, driving them back, unraveling the ropes of purple to threads, then wisps. Before the display had progressed half as far as before the bulk of the presumably irken force was reduced to a few scraps at dead ends, the blue once again solidly taking up the rest of the space, spreading like smoke.

The female tech that had protested Dib's arrival before stepped forward, indicating a stretch of tunnels with metal legs of her own, zooming the display in on it.

"And where, Alpha, do you propose the pre-ads sleep after you stampede half a dozen troops through their dormitories? It will be in the middle of their sleep rota too, I might add."

"Oh." Alpha's shoulders sagged a little. "What, they changed it again?"

"As of three months ago, Dib."

"What about if we went through…here?"

"And ruin half this months rations from radiation burns? Those new tasers _leak_, Dib, no matter what the Mech Techs claim this week-" A short, burly tech with a shaved head and a beard like a purple dandelion and no apparent eyes made a grunt of protest and was silenced by a particularly venomous glare from the woman, "-and I know absolutely no one that's going to be happy to glowing patches on the new apples or the midgets frolicking through the kitchens"

"Your suggestion, Quartermaster?"

"Well, if one would take my _humble_ advice into consideration, I would suggest…"

Dib startled, loosing the thread of the conversation as another tech –the surprisingly muscular teak-colored man with the Einsteinian shock of white hair and a deeply seamed face- nudged him in the shoulder with an elbow that appeared more metal-and-plastic plating than flesh.

"He's testing you, you know."

"Yeah?" Dib muttered, still watching Alpha and the rest of the techs gravely discussing things, the wild spark that he'd seen in the man smothered again under the professional stance and sober expression.

"Yep. And take it from me, you do _not_ want to fail his little games. You clones are all the fun he really has, anymore, and he seems to have taken a special interest in you. First time he's let a Beta into the Trid Room since- in a while."

Dib scowled. "Guess I'm just special."

The man ran a hand distractedly through his wild hair, sighing. "You have no idea. And if you two will excuse me, I've got to point out something to those peacocks over there."

As the man headed towards the rest of the techs Dib saw his tyro slumped against the wall, trembling.

"Are- are you okay?" Dib asked worriedly.

"Th-that was the Adgen." She whispered, still in shock. "The Admiral General just …spoke to us."

"Um. Okay?" Dib hazarded.

"Y-yeah. Okay." She smiled shakily. Before Dib could probe further Alpha had called him over, asking another question, something about whether he remembered the exact protein strain that had given Zim that nasty rash that one time. Testing him. And before Dib could look back for his guide he was being led into another room, full of weaponry he'd only dreamed about, the Tyro bobbing along timidly in the background, but she wasn't important anymore because Alpha was still probing, still talking, still showing Dib new things, new things, all with that same smoldering intensity buried underneath his every action but it didn't matter either anymore because everything was going too fast, too intense suddenly and he was being strapped into a chair with no back, the group of old men and women watching intently as Dib pulled off one of his cyan paks, smiling strangely.

"This is going to hurt." He said. "But it's worth it."

And Dib screamed as the pack was pressed between his shoulders, the wired drilling their way through his skin, into his _brain-_

PORT ESTABLISHED WITH DIB v. bBA': NEW USER. UPGRADING TO DIB v. bBA. UPLOADING BASIC USERINFO; COORDINATION SACHET 00001: ALTERIOR LIMBS ENABLED.

FISION DRIVE ENABLED Y/N?

-_"Gaz- I'm going out to infiltrate Zim's base again, okay? I'll be back in" -he checked his watch, "an hour or so. If I don't come back, tell Agent Nessie that the eagle has landed in the chocolate cement, okay?"_

_Gaz glared over the rim of her gameslaveIII. "You're letting the warm air out." She growled._

"_The fate of humanity is at stake!" _

"_You're letting the warm air out!"_

"_But Gaaaz- ow!" She threw a lamp at his head with painful accuracy and he ducked hurriedly out the door, slamming it behind him and adjusting his glasses angrily as he wiped away the blood welling out of the gash on his forehead with his other hand.-_

…HIGH STRESS LEVEL DETECTED… NEGATIVE. N AFFIRMED. FISION DRIVE NOT ENABLED.

CUTTING TO INDIGENOUS POWER….ENABLED.

PAINCONTROLL...ENABLED.

-A millisecond of agony later and everything went numb. He choked off his scream abruptly, coughing, his ears ringing. He was vaguely aware of Alpha unbuckling the straps on his wrists grimly.

"Well?"

Dib coughed. His throat hurt… "Why?"

"I'd like to know too, Dib." The woman –the Quartermaster- said wryly. "Why all the fuss over a beta?"

Alpha straitened up, his long spine crackling as he gave the pak on Dib's back a thoughtful tap.

"I'd like to try…something different for a change." He murmured, his eyes distant. They hardened abruptly as he hoisted Dib out of the strange chair.

"How do you feel?"

He's testing you. Dib pulled himself to attention, the numb weight on his back settling between his shoulders… it felt like a missing tooth when one probed it with one's tongue. Painless but disturbingly wrong. He'd never noticed on Zim's pak but this bent like stiff rubber, almost, twisting ever-so-slightly and seamlessly to accommodate his spine. He bit down a hysterical wail, and a near-identical rush of manic laughter. He could feel his four new limbs stir inside the pak as he tested them…

"Just fine." He said, lifting his chin to lock gazes with his older self. Alpha grinned savagely and Dib saw the man, the AdGen, smile secretly, turning away.


End file.
